Hitler’s Control

The lessons of Nazi history

This week's CBS
miniseries
Hitler: The Rise of Evil tries to explain the conditions that
enabled a manifestly evil and abnormal individual to gain total power
and to commit mass murder. The CBS series looks at some of the people
whose flawed decisions paved the way for Hitler's psychopathic
dictatorship: Hitler's mother who refused to recognize that her child
was extremely disturbed and anti-social; the judge who gave Hitler a
ludicrously short prison sentence after he committed high treason at
the Beer Hall Putsch; President Hindenburg and the Reichstag delegates
who (except for the Social Democrats) who acceded to Hitler's
dictatorial Enabling Act rather than forcing a crisis (which, no
matter how bad the outcome, would have been far better than Hitler
being able to claim legitimate power and lead Germany toward world
war).

Acquainting a
new generation of television viewers with the monstrosity of Hitler is
a commendable public service by CBS, for if we are serious about
"Never again," then we must be serious about remembering how and why
Hitler was able to accomplish what he did. Political scientist
R. J.
Rummel, the world's foremost scholar of the mass murders of the
20th century,
estimates that the Nazis killed about 21 million people, not
including war casualties. With modern technology, a modern Hitler
might be able to kill even more people even more rapidly.

Indeed, right
now in Zimbabwe, the Robert Mugabe tyranny is
perpetrating a genocide by starvation aimed at liquidating about
six million people. Mugabe is great admirer of Adolf Hitler. Mugabe's
number-two man (who died last year) was Chenjerai Hunzvi, the head of
Mugabe's terrorist gangs, who nicknamed himself "Hitler." One of the
things that Robert Mugabe, "Hitler" Hunzvi, and Adolf Hitler all have
in common is their strong and effective
programs of gun control.

Simply put, if
not for gun control, Hitler would not have been able to murder 21
million people. Nor would Mugabe be able to carry out his current
terror program.

Writing in
The Arizona Journal of International & Comparative Law Stephen
Halbrook demonstrates that German Jews and other German opponents of
Hitler were not destined to be helpless and passive victims. (A
magazine
article by Halbrook offers a shorter version of the story, along
with numerous photographs. Halbrook's Arizona article is also
available as a chapter in the book Death by Gun Control,
published by Jews for
the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.) Halbrook details how,
upon assuming power, the Nazis relentlessly and ruthlessly disarmed
their German opponents. The Nazis feared the Jews — many of whom were
front-line veterans of World War One — so much that Jews were even
disarmed of knives and old sabers.

The Nazis did
not create any new firearms laws until 1938. Before then, they were
able to use the Weimar Republic's gun controls to ensure that there
would be no internal resistance to the Hitler regime.

In 1919, facing
political and economic chaos and possible Communist revolution after
Germany's defeat in the First World War, the Weimar Republic enacted
the Regulation of the Council of the People's Delegates on Weapons
Possession. The new law banned the civilian possession of all firearms
and ammunition, and demanded their surrender "immediately."

Once the
political and economic situation stabilized, the Weimar Republic
created a less draconian gun-control law. The law was similar to,
although somewhat milder than, the gun laws currently demanded by the
American gun-control lobby.

The Weimar Law
on Firearms and Ammunition required a license to engage in any type of
firearm business. A special license from the police was needed to
either purchase or carry a firearm. The German police were granted
complete discretion to deny licenses to criminals or individuals the
police deemed untrustworthy. Unlimited police discretion over citizen
gun acquisition is the foundation of the "Brady II" proposal
introduced by Handgun Control, Inc., (now called the Brady Campaign)
in 1994.

Under the
Weimar law, no license was needed to possess a firearm in the home
unless the citizen owned more than five guns of a particular type or
stored more than 100 cartridges. The law's requirements were more
relaxed for firearms of a "hunting" or "sporting" type. Indeed, the
Weimar statute was the world's first gun law to create a formal
distinction between sporting and non-sporting firearms. On the issues
of home gun possession and sporting guns, the Weimar law was not as
stringent as the current Massachusetts gun law, or some of modern
proposals supported by American gun-control lobbyists.

Significantly,
the Weimar law required the registration of most lawfully owned
firearms, as do the laws of some American states. In Germany, the
Weimar registration program law provided the information which the
Nazis needed to disarm the Jews and others considered untrustworthy.

The Nazi
disarmament campaign that began as soon as Hitler assumed power in
1933. While some genocidal governments (such as the Khmer Rouge in
Cambodia) dispensed with lawmaking, the Nazi government followed the
German predilection for the creation of large volumes of written rules
and regulations. Yet it was not until March 1938 (the same month that
Hitler annexed Austria in the Anschluss) that the Nazis created
their own Weapons Law. The new law formalized what had been the policy
imposed by Hitler using the Weimar Law: Jews were prohibited from any
involvement in any firearm business.

On November 9,
1938, the Nazis launched the
Kristallnacht, pogrom, and unarmed Jews all over Germany were
attacked by government-sponsored mobs. In conjunction with
Kristallnacht, the government used the administrative authority of the
1938 Weapons Law to require immediate Jewish surrender of all firearms
and edged weapons, and to mandate a sentence of death or 20 years in a
concentration camp for any violation.

Even after
1938, the German gun laws were not prohibitory. They simply gave the
government enough information and enough discretion to ensure that
victims inside Germany would not be able to fight back.

Under the
Hitler regime, the Germans had created a superbly trained and very
large military — the most powerful military the world had ever seen
until then. Man-for-man, the Nazis had greater combat effectiveness
than every other army in World War II, and were finally defeated
because of the overwhelming size of the Allied armies and the
immensely larger economic resources of the Allies.

Despite having
an extremely powerful army, the Nazis still feared the civilian
possession of firearms by hostile civilians. Events in 1943 proved
that the fear was not mere paranoia. As knowledge of the death camps
leaked out, determined Jews rose up in arms in Tuchin, Warsaw,
Bialystok, Vilna, and elsewhere. Jews also joined partisan armies in
Eastern Europe in large numbers, and amazingly, even organized escapes
and revolts in the killing centers of Treblinka and Auschwitz. There
are many books which recount these heroic stories of resistance. Yuri
Suhl's They Fought Back(1967) is a good summary showing that
hundreds of thousands of Jews did fight. The book Escape from Sobibor
and the eponymous
movie (1987) tell the amazing story how Russian Jewish prisoners
of war organized a revolt that permanently destroyed one of the main
death camps.

It took the
Nazis months to destroy the Jews who rose up in the Warsaw ghetto, who
at first were armed with only a few firearms that had been purchased
on the black market, stolen or obtained from the Polish underground.

Halbrook
contends that the history of Germany might have been changed if more
of its citizens had been armed, and if the right to bear arms had been
enshrined it Germany's culture and constitution. Halbrook points out
that while resistance took place in many parts of occupied Europe,
there was almost no resistance in Germany itself, because the Nazis
had enjoyed years in which they could enforce the gun laws to ensure
that no potential opponent of the regime had the means to resist.

No one can
foresee with certainty which countries will succumb to genocidal
dictatorship. Germany under the Weimar Republic was a democracy in a
nation with a very long history of much greater tolerance for Jews
than existed in France, England, or Russia, or almost anywhere else.
Zimbabwe's current gun laws were created when the nation was the
British colony of Rhodesia, and the authors of those laws did not know
that the laws would one day be enforced by an African Hitler bent on
mass extermination.

One never knows
if one will need a fire extinguisher. Many people go their whole lives
without needing to use a fire extinguisher, and most people never need
firearms to resist genocide. But if you don't prepare to have a
life-saving tool on hand during an unexpected emergency, then you and
your family may not survive.

In the book Children of the Flames, Auschwitz survivor Menashe Lorinczi
recounts what happened when the Soviet army liberated the camp: the
Russians disarmed the SS guards. Then, two emaciated Jewish inmates,
now armed with guns taken from the SS, systematically exacted their
revenge on a large formation of SS men. The disarmed SS passively
accepted their fate. After Lorinczi moved to Israel, he was often
asked by other Israelis why the Jews had not fought back against the
Germans. He replied that many Jews did fight. He then recalled the
sudden change in the behavior of the Jews and the Germans at
Auschwitz, once the Russian army's new "gun control" policy changed
who had the guns there: "And today, when I am asked that question, I
tell people it doesn't matter whether you're Hungarian, Polish,
Jewish, or German: If you don't have a gun, you have nothing."

Richard Griffiths is a doctor of psychology with research interest
in gun issues. Dave
Kopel is a NRO contributing editor.

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